Language for Those Who Have Nothing: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry

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The aim of this book is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of dialogism and polyphony, the carnival and the chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed. Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realized in the context of given social dimensions. The organization of the text corresponds with carnival practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry’s unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity.